Mike Turk puts some numbers to a thought I’d had rolling around my head since shortly after the controversy over the incendiary remarks by Obama’s former pastor went big-time last week:
First, consider the results of a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll conducted last week. The survey results indicate that since December the number of people who believe Obama is a Muslim jumped from 8% to 13%. That’s a 62% increase in only three months. How many “middle of the road” Americans received the “Obama is a Muslim” e-mail from friends and either read it or passed it to someone else? Now pretend your Obama and the “whisper” campaign is that you’re really a dirty terrorist in hiding. Anything that focuses the public attention on your twenty year membership is a Christian church may be a very, very good thing.
Whether this is correct or not, I suppose we’ll find out in a few weeks. However, I’m skeptical that it’s much of a victory to replace the incorrect impression that Obama is a Muslim with the correct impression that his closest spiritual adviser has a fierce anti-American streak.
Consider the Romney campaign’s unsuccessful attempt to win over evangelical voters. After all, Mike Huckabee all but swept the Southern Republican primaries where their votes figured prominently. Romney could probably tell you that simply believing in God and Jesus Christ isn’t always enough.
Which leaves me with this question: Could “black liberation theology,” to which which the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Chicago’s Trinity church adhere, become the focus of whispers and speculation and suspicion? I think it’s quite plausible, and I find the prospect fairly troubling. It would surely be ironic if the Obama campaign produced a wider rift between black and white Americans.
Obama’s slowness to deal with the Wright time bomb, and muddled initial response, is somewhat like Kerry’s inept response to the Swift Boaters’ allegations. With his speech today, going on over my shoulder in the background, however, he’s trying to address it head on. This suggests Obama recognizes how divisive Wright’s rhetoric and his own apparent tolerance thereof can be, to his own campaign at the very least.
I’m agnostic, so to speak, about Obama’s campaign in general. (Not so much in the general.) But in this task I hope he succeeds.
Obama wants it both ways. He asks America to rise above race and religion, while hoping to appear religious himself. But he is in deep trouble if a spotlight is shined on his own THEOLOGY. See:
http://miraclesdaily.blogspot.com
Which two ways does he want it? I think Obama faces a real dilemma here, whether he embraces Wright’s theology or casts himself as more of a casual churchgoer. But I’ll have to read his speech (and some commentary thereof) before I make up my mind.
I posted on this a few minutes ago via Utterz, and had not yet seen your post.
I think today’s speech may have been an overreach. I think Obama actually runs the risk of being viewed as some sort of Manchurian candidate - but not a Muslim one. His direct engagement on matters of race run the risk that he’ll be perceived as a radical race warrior in hiding. People may see him as someone waiting to grab the reins of power who will spend 4-8 years making us deal with race issues.
On some visceral level, I think that’s something a lot of caucasians don’t want to contemplate.